Notebook
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Drone Warfare: effective or counter-productive?
28 Apr 2013
While there can be no doubt that the national and international legal regulation of the deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, drones) for the purposes of surveillance, monitoring, intelligence gathering, and military strikes is of great importance, it is equally significant to take account of the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the deployment of drones, especially in relation to their use for targeted killing.
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Managing Expectations in Yemen’s National Dialogue Conference
18 Apr 2013
Managing expectations inside and outside of Yemen about what the National Dialogue can accomplish will enable broadly acceptable outcomes to be achieved by participants in the conference and their subsequent sustainable implementation by all stakeholders.
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International Conflict Management after Libya: the glass (still) half-full?
13 Mar 2013
The international community’s capacity for conflict management remains a potentially highly effective, albeit not flawless, instrument for managing a wide range of security challenges, which, however, will be applied, as it always has, selectively and in line with the national interests of the great powers.
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The Transnistrian Issue: Moving Beyond the Status-Quo
28 Dec 2012
The EU has a clear opportunity to contribute to the settlement of the Transnistrian conflict and prove itself an effective conflict manager and actor for stability and security in its own neighbourhood. This is a task that is not without challenges, but these challenges are of such a nature that the EU can, and must, confront them.
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Legal, Legitimate, and Effective Drone Warfare?
21 Nov 2012
Together with my colleagues David H. Dunn and Nicholas Wheeler from the Institute for...
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Sudan and South Sudan’s unresolved post-independence issues
14 Aug 2012
Two rather sobering conclusions are difficult to escape one year after South Sudan’s independence. The first is that the situation in South Sudan has hardly improved for the majority of its population during the first twelve months of independence. The second conclusion is that the overwhelming majority of challenges that have plagued South Sudan in its attempts to build a viable independent state have their causes in local leadership failures.
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Twenty Years On: The Continuing Relevance of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities
15 Jul 2012
Given the persistence of minority-majority tensions and conflict across the OSCE area and beyond, the institution of the High Commissioner on National Minorities remains as relevant today as twenty years ago, and I see three specific areas in which the HCNM has a future role to play: monitoring, preventive quiet diplomacy, and policy transfer.
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Leadership, Diplomacy, and Institutional Design: A Model for Understanding the Arab Spring?
21 May 2012
In this contribution to the special section on Human Conflict, I argue that three ‘ingredients’ are essential in managing processes such as the Arab Spring and their aftermath successfully: leadership, diplomacy, and institutional design.
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Libya’s Arab Spring: What lessons for the EU?
13 Apr 2012
After more than 25,000 sorties and close to 10,000 airstrikes between March and October 2011,...
